Benjy's IT Blog

So, there are a couple of chapters in John Sonmez's book,  Soft Skills The Software Developer's Life Manual,  that covers increasing your productivity.  Now, I consider myself a pretty focused person and pretty productive, but there's always room for improvement right?  Some sections talk about how ALL people procrastinate at some time or the other, but how can you get more focus and less procrastination (and minimize those distractions)? Well, one of the recommendations is the Pomodoro Technique which is basically setting up blocks of time to focus, then take a break.  Usually in increments of 25 minutes of focused work, then a 5 minute break, then after each 4 small breaks you get a 15 minute break.  There's a website called  KanbanFlow.com  that uses this technique and helps you track your time and your tasks, projects, etc.  I've been using it for about one week now and I really like it and I can tell I have become even more productive.  I know exactly what

Just read an interesting article by Jason Weimann called  How to Get Started in Game Development  - talks about the similarities of game development to app development.  The articles recommends using a coding environment called Unity and here's the  Unity Tutorial  - I'm going to put this on my list of "to learns" after becoming more familiar with C# and Python.

One of my goals this year is to learn as many new languages as possible.  My goal for the first 6 months of the 2018 year is to learn PHP, C# (along with the .NET framework), and Python. Well I've completed the first one, PHP, which stands for Hypertext Preprocesser.  This was a lot easier than expected after going through the tutorials on  w3schools.com  - and it has some similarities to VBScript in Microsoft's Classic ASP. It only took me about 4 days to learn and I created some of my own test pages with success!  Now I'm not saying I'm an expert at PHP but I could definitely develop a fully functional website in PHP within a couple of days.  The code seems to be a little more efficient than VBscript as well. I'm hoping to teach what I've learned in PHP with a group like Toastmasters. I'm still in the process of learning C# and .NET; there's much more to learn than with PHP, and I'll be starting on Python soon!

Read a really good article by  Cynthia Dzikiti  called  Coping With the Challenges of Software Development  - one of the paragraphs that stood out was: " Technical knowledge can be acquired academically, but the proficiency necessary for successful professional software development are developed over time through learning and experience. A problem-solving mindset and the discipline to establish and follow systematic approaches to problem resolution are vital factors to success." After 22 years of software development, I find this so true!  There's a lot of information in this article that I can relate to and I would recommend reading the article if you're into software development.

As the end of 2017 neared I decided there had to be some changes in my professional life.  I wasn't sure exactly what kind of changes were needed but after 22 years of software/web development (17 with my current employer) it was time. At my first place of employment, I developed primarily in Visual Basic with Access as our database.  We eventually transitioned to SQL Server right before leaving there.  I'll cover more about what I accomplished there in a later Blog post. And now after about 17 years with my current employer, I transitioned into more into web programming as we have developed our own internal intranet with software fit to meet the needs of our business.  We still use Classic ASP, yes I know, but when something's not broke, don't fix it right!?  Working for a smaller company, not as many changes are needed when it comes to software development.  So, we still use Classic ASP, and I have pretty much becoming an expert in it using VBScript, JavaScript, a